Relevance to doaskdotell: gays in the military and “don’t
ask don’t tell”

Review:

I’ll focus here on former president Bill Clinton’s record on gay issues,
most notably his attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military right after
his 1993 inauguration.

There are a lot of references to gay issues in the index. For example, in
1976 Arkansas was revamping its
criminal code to eliminate “status offenses.”Conservatives balked at the idea of removing sodomy laws, and a tense
battle ensued of various maneuvers. Clinton
lost that battle, although at the time it didn’t seem to mean much. But the
idea might have set up the logical mental dichotomy that would stimulate his
idea of lifting the gay ban, the distinction between “status” and
“conduct.”Unfortunately, the
politicians in 1993 would try to blur this as a distinction without a
difference (or vice versa).

Clinton indeed gives a
detailed and insightful yet succinct account of the volleys over gays in the
military at the start of his first term, from pp 483-486.I could say that the passage, in its
writing style, could make good fodder for an SAT
or PRAXIS reading comprehension test, since the meaning is still subtle.
We’ve all heard a lot about the objections from Nunn and Moskos
over “privacy in the barracks,” but less about the purely “moral” objections
to homosexuality from Marine Corps General Carl Mundy and even Democratic
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd even claimed that the Roman
Empire had fallen because of the acceptance of homosexuality
among its warriors—and this is incorrect; it probably fell because of the use
of lead in its water pipes.

Clinton finally mentions the
“live and let live” policy compromise of July 1993. That is the name that I
gave it in Chapter 4
of my own book, and it even got an honorable mention in the 1997 movie Starship Troopers. Clinton
gives a terse summary:

“Don’t ask don’t tell” basically said that
if you say you’re gay, it’s presumed that you intend to violate the Uniform
Code of Military Justice and you can be removed unless you convince your
commander you’re celibate and therefore not in violation of the code. But if
you don’t say you’re gay, the following things will not lead to your removal:
marching in a gay-rights parade in civilian clothes, hanging out in gay bars
or with known homosexuals, being on homosexual mailing lists, and living with
a person of the same sex who is a beneficiary on your life insurance policy.
On paper, the military had moved a long way to “live and let live,” while
holding on to that it couldn’t acknowledge gays without approving of
homosexuality and compromising morale and cohesion.”

In 1993, the focus of compromise seemed to be a “zone of privacy,” where
each servicemember would have his or her private
life and the ability to choose adult significant other. The difficulty in
making this work without openness would become apparent in the mid and late
1990s as the Internet grew and as sexuality became perceived more as a
vehicle of selection and self-expression.

Clinton goes on to admit that
the policy often backfired, with anti-gay commands conducting the notorious
witch-hunts that SLDN would have to fight—some commanders would test the
policy if they could get away with it.Clinton also admits that
his political opponents (‘dem Republicans) would
make it look like the military ban was his only issue, when most of his time
was actually spent on the economy and health care. Clinton
insists that Congress would have overridden his veto, and gays seem
unappreciative of his efforts, even though he made real advances in civilian
security clearances (although Frank Kameny has said
on media broadcasts that real progress had been made in the previous Bush
administration).

What is most remarkable, of course, is the idea that the military assumed
that accepting semi-open gays would imply approval of homosexuality. Why
cannot the military follow orders and assume that its public attitude is
neutral? I developed this idea myself in Chapter 2 of my
book, when I discussed the draft.Typically, society has not taken freedom for granted, has presumed
that it must be earned by rites of passage for men, and the military always
had a big say in what these rites should be.

The afterword gives an autumnal recapitulation, as he recreates the
tribunal of his own coronary bypass surgery. In the end, he says, “every
person counts, deserves a chance, and has a
responsible role to play.”

Bill Clinton had also written the brief book Clinton,
William J., President of the United States.
Between Hope and History: Meeting America's
Challenges for the 21st Century. New York:
Random House, 1996; Hilary had written It Takes a Village, about child
rearing, a topic very relevant to teaching and the problems today with “no
child left behind.” But that’s another discussion.

Clinton’s mention of the life
insurance beneficiary provision is interesting. I was working for a life
insurance company at the time that I wrote the “White House Letter” and oddly
I did not consider mentioning that specific potential problem.

Bill Clinton, while president, authored Clinton, William
J., President of the United States.
Between Hope and History: Meeting America's
Challenges for the 21st Century. New
York: Random House, 1996.His wife Hillary authored It Takes a
Village.

I lived in Greenwich Village for the first two years of the Carter
presidency, 1978 being a particularly memorable year (I remember the Camp
David meeting that Carter arranged between Begin and Sadat), and the next two
years in Dallas, when the Iran hostage crisis occurred. Of course, we all
know the history since then. During that time, the pastor at the moderate FirstBaptistChurch
in Washington (where I grew up)
counseled the president that conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention
would pillory him for “secular humanism” for his reasonable stands on most
social issues. I remember, on a weekend visit “home,” attending a Sunday
School class taught by President Carter in the Church sanctuary balcony in
1977, the lesson on the “divorce chapter.” Carter talks about the MaranathaBaptishChurch
near his home in Georgia;
this is a moderate church that he helped form, and he feels it is closer to
Baptist tradition. In a similar fashion, Everett Goodwin formed the Baptist
Fellowship of Washington DC in the mid 1990s shortly after leaving the same FirstBaptistChurch.
I often attended the Fellowship, during the same time period that I worked on
my first book.

In the mid 1990s, I also heard Mr. Carter speak at the Washington
Cathedral, when he talked about “service” in conjunction for Habitat for
Humanity. Now, in this book, he manages to tie practically every major issue
together, which is quite unusual and remarkable.

His thesis is pretty transparent. The “Religious Right” is using its
pretense of morality and arrogant intolerance to try to get its own way. That
shouldn’t surprise anyone. Mr. Carter discusses fundamentalists and
evangelicals, and soon moves on to the social issues, and provides an
original poem, “A Contemplation of What Has Been Created and Why.”

Chapter 7 is “Sins of Divorce and Homosexuality,” and Carter summarizes
the right’s preoccupation with homosexuality in simple fashion. It makes an
easy mark to try to polarize the public, which on its own has grown more
accepting of homosexuality. At the end of the chapter, he makes a rather
libertarian proposal.

“Rather than letting the controversial
issue [gay marriage] remain so divisive among our citizens, perhaps we should
separate the two basic approaches, by letting governments define and protect
equal rights for citizens, including those of “civil unions,” and letting
church congregations define ‘holy matrimony.’”

He moves on to the big international issues, maintaining that hawkish Bush
administration is wrong in waging preventative war in Iraq when there was
never any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, then discusses the
environment, energy, and global warming, and finally ends to the heart of the
crisis, the growing divide between the haves and have-nots.Here he points out the irresponsibility of
the Bush practice of staggering deficits while allowing huge tax cuts for the
rich.

The question then is of moral leadership. A superpower, he says, is like a
great person. Doing the right thing need not involve sacrifice; he also says
that. But it is the mapping of the public policy back to citizenship
responsibilities of the individual that is indeed controversial.

The religious right gets away with its diversion of picking on
homosexuality partly because, in today’s world, male homosexuality symbolizes
in a deep-seated way a pungent problem: personal autonomy and self-promotion
and narcissism without appropriate level of family responsibility (primarily
through openness to having children) and commitment to others. Of course, the
same “sin” is created on a much grander scale by heterosexuals. But, the
Gospel seems very clear on its expectation of socialization, shared
sacrifice, and connection to others ahead in line of self-promotion. Given
that kind of commitment, the Bible seems to accept some inequality in
exchange for a sum or personal attitudes that will take care of people, even
at the compromise of what we have come to see as freedom (autonomy). It may
well be that the moral crisis can only be resolved at a personal level by
every one of us first.

Former President Carter has authored many other books, including Why
Not the Best? (1975), and An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural
Boyhood (2001)

Jimmy Carter.
Palestine:
Peace, not Apartheid. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2007. ISBN 0-7432-8502-6Historical Chronology, 17 Chapters,
7 appendices, indexed. 264 pages, hardcover.The title of this book generated enormous controversy, and the book
was the subject of the film Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains. Carter, while
praising Israel
as a democracy within its own society, pulls no punches in blaming Israel
for bad faith in its treatment of Palestinians, expropriating rights without
compensation. Some key quotes:

“It’s obvious that the Palestinians will be
left with no territory in which to establish a viable state, but completely
enclosed within the barrier of the occupied Jordan River valley.”P
196

“The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill
and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning and
abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian
territories.” P. 216

Colin Powell,
My
American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995) ISBN
0-679-43296-5. 645 pgs hardcover, indexed. This is Colin Powell’s
autobiography, in four distinct sections that trace his boyhood and his rise
through the military, starting in the Vietnam
era, to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Of course, his story is
touted as a major example of how the military promoted the careers of African
Americans, after Truman’s 1948 integration. Powell provides several
references to “gays in the military” and his testimony before Sam Nunn in
Congress in 1993, and his being questioned even by Barney Frank. In one place
(p 547) he writes:

“If I have heterosexual young men and women
who choose not to have to be in close proximity because of different sexual
preferences, am I then forced to face the problem of different accommodations
for homosexuals and heterosexuals, and by sex within the homosexual
community?”

“Skin color is a benign, nonbehavioralcharacteristic.,,
Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics.
Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.”

The first of these quotes would have compelled four sets of quarters
instead of two. It is interesting see Powell discuss these sensitive points
in rather objectivist language.